Graduate Program

The English Department provides a supportive, collaborative environment for rigorous graduate study and professional development. Faculty and students work together to ensure all students achieve their goals as thinkers and scholars. The program is not designed to grant a terminal MA degree. Instead, it is expected that students will proceed beyond the MA degree to PhD study.

As part of a Research I university, we have a distinguished, award-winning faculty, whose collective expertise covers a wide range of historical periods, authors, literary and aesthetic movements, and critical discourses. Special interests among our faculty include Black cultural studies; Marxist, feminist, and queer perspectives on literature and culture; postcolonial and multicultural studies; visual and material culture; poststructuralist theory; science studies; and environmental humanities.

The English Department offers small graduate seminars in a variety of fields and topics each term. For recent offerings see Current and Archive course information. Students may also take approved courses in other Tufts departments, as well as enroll in classes in a consortium of schools that includes Boston College, Boston University, and Brandeis University, and in the interdisciplinary Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) located at MIT.

After undergoing supervised training to help them master the necessary skills, our Ph.D. students gain valuable teaching experience, designing and offering their own courses as Graduate Instructors in Tufts' First-Year Writing Program. The Experimental College and the OSHER Program for Lifelong Learning provide additional opportunities for students to design and teach courses at Tufts. The strong training in pedagogy that the department provides and the experience our students gain as classroom instructors prepares our Ph.D. candidates well for a competitive job market. Our recent Ph.D. recipients have secured faculty positions, including on the tenure-track, as well as other academic positions, such as directing a writing center and in college and independent school administration. Our students have also been successful in winning prestigious post-doctoral fellowships, including multi-year teaching fellowships.

If you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch with us at gradenglish@tufts.edu.